Some embodiments described herein relate generally to switch fabric systems, and, in particular, to methods and apparatus for operations, administration and maintenance validation within a distributed switch fabric system.
Some known switch fabric systems include multiple paths between a source device and a destination device. For example, a Clos network can provide multiple paths between an ingress port and an egress port. In such known switch fabric, systems, the traffic (e.g., data packets) can be distributed across these data paths. In such a switch fabric, any given flow, which may be an operations, administration and management/maintenance (OAM) mechanism (e.g., validation process), can be sent to less than all of the data paths. In such a network or switch fabric, the OAM mechanism may fail to detect forwarding failures (if any) on other paths in the network or switch fabric. Thus, such an OAM mechanism aimed at validating such a network or switch fabric may be incapable of validating the various possible paths within the network or switch fabric.
Accordingly, a need exists for an OAM mechanism that can be used to validate the various possible paths within a switch fabric system.